Quote: 200 miles or more from the nearest piece of coal or living in a population where 96.2% of their neighbors think Anthracite has something to do with terrorism or maybe rock music, theses folks get frustrated when they speak to a Harman dealer in their area and the Dealer isn't helpful. Duh . Call a dealer in Coal Country UnQuote.

What does this have to do with reading their own website and knowing that their dealership actually sold these products??

Seems like your attempt at a pro-Harman thread has turned around to being yet again...a list of bad Harman dealer experiences many from forum members who do live in coal country and attempted to get product support or service from dealers in coal country... 'duh' .

& I'd still rather have a well built, solidly performing stove with no one to call then a piece of crap with very friendly people at their site to chat with.As Harry Truman said (about Washington DC, but applies here too)"If you want a friend.........Buy a dog!"

I admire Dale Harman. He built that company from scratch. They build an excellent product and promote some of them well. But some of the products have been been under promoted. Mostly the coal products. If he has a fault, it's that he or his staff didn't realize that poor quality of the manuals would be a problem for non-professionals installing their own systems or professionals who aren't very familiar with coal systems. It's unfortunate but the poor manuals really diminish the perception of Harman products. The truth is that a group of talented engineers and craftsman make a variety of very hign quality stoves, furnaces and boilers but support them with sub-standard documentation. The manual for the VF3000 has many more omissions and short-comings than just the combustion fan restricter plate issue. They should have had a position that was soley rersponsible for producing high quality documentation. Hopefully the new folks willl recognize it. I think I'll rewrite the manual and send it to Harman gratis. Maybe they will reward me with a free stove or maybe just a T shirt and damn coffee cup!

I could make a "unofficial manual" list... I'd even make up a regular page for that. Credit of course to whoever made it, either username or real name. One thing to note if anybody wants to do this is the originals will be copyrighted so you'd have to do a complete new document unless you got permission from the manufacturer to use there's as a source.

LsFarm wrote: When I called a dealer, they didn't even know what products the factory was able to sell them to be sold through THEIR store/dealership.Harman makes good products but they have serious issues with customer support, and dealer education. Pretty sad considering all they had to do was look at their own literature.Greg L

GregSeems like you had more of a Sales problem rather than a customer service or support problem . Maybe the Dealer really didn't want to get involved in Coal Stove Sales given your location its feasible or perhaps he felt the level of support you would need after the sale was more than he wanted to get involved with .

If I was a Coal Stove dealer in Michigan I would feel obligated to make Coal available perhaps this was more than he wanted to get involved with .

Could be any number of reasons they didn't want to sell a stove to you . Were they more eager with a stove using a different fuel ?

If anyone else has the Harman TLC-2000, please let me know if you have better luck than me in top-loading it? (I find I have very little control over where the coal ends up so I load throught the regular window door)

Whether I'm working out on the farm or in the house or whatever, I'd much rather have a good piece of equipment and never call the dealer rather than have a really great fixit man on speed-dial . And I've had both...

That being said, Harman's website is nothing more than a showroom, though it says so right on the home-page. As far as defending the dealer, the shop local to me sells more than Harmans, and helped me out finding parts for my old Surdiac before I decided to use coal as primary heat. Afterwards, he had priced me a Mag and a Mark III before I privately found mine used, and his reaction to that was to let me know that the balance of the original warranty transferred to me, no questions. I'm sure it helped that I was already a customer of sorts and had already been through the door for other stuff but that's normal business in my area (if you deal with black-hat farmers, that's the only way to do business sometimes, but that's another topic!)

Then again, I'm pretty confident he sells more coal appliances than everything else together, and he seems to know anthracite and stoves up one side and down the other, so maybe I'm one of the lucky guys who's in the right area with the right shop. Point being, I love my Mag and everything about it!

woodheat wrote:I also have a harman coal stove but in my opinion the customer service sucks!!!! the stove is great so i guess something has to give

I agree, as I just called the main telephone number; 717-362-1422 and asked if they had an Email address to ask a technical question. The operator told me to give a list of questions to the dealer and they can call them in. So I will go to a dealer that said that he would take my Austroflamm in trade for what I want, but he knows nothing about the coal stoves. I told him I would give him a bag of rice coal which he has never seen before, to try in a pellet stove. Currently I am adding rice coal to my wood pellets, with no apparent problem. So far I have only added 5# of coal to 40# of pellets. Has anyone tried this? I plan to try higher and higher ratios.I wish I find and call a Harman dealer that actually sells the DVC-500 and VF3000,. to ask if I can with some adjustments; burn my remaining wood pellets. Yes, I know that wood pellets do not perform like coal.Can anyone give me the name of such a dealer, and one that really, really knows the product; is not just a salesman?

I would not do that, the coal burns a lot hotter than pellets and can cause damage to your burn pot, I doubt that you are gaining much by doing this either. Also a piece of hard coal can easily jam or damage your pellet auger.

You can mix corn with your pellets and recieve a boost in BTU'S. But I am morally against that!

I bought my boiler from a PA dealer who had never seen a VF3000 let alone install one. They haven't sold that many. My serial number is like 200. I'd be curious what the serial number is of some one with a "new" one.[/quote]Wow, when did you purchase it? That is sad; so many dealers and so few that promote coal stoves and boilers. I wish that the coal industry reps would actively sell rice coal and direct vent stoves to the big stores; that are selling pellet stoves and pellets.

the harman magnum i purchased in sept. 2006 is a well made product & has given no problems...that said, let me continue.

the owner manual (operating instructions) was obviously afforded less supervision than the production of their stoves. the absence of coherent sentences & no paragraph spacing had me re-reading it many times to make some sense of it.

our world depends entirely on language and grammar (correctly spelled) and this is what is sorely missing at the harman plant viewing their manual.

the dealer who delivered it simply told me to leave the feed rate at 2 dots "and you'll be fine." they set it to 4 on / 12 off and they were gone.

at $2800.00 for the magnum delivered i expected more and it was not their fault, it was the factory's owner manual not being compiled by someone actually using the stove for the first time with all the variables expected in running it.

with a $60 dvd recorder i get a manual 1/2 inch thick telling me everything i need to know...harman could have afforded me a more comprehensive manual with this expensive unit than a few vague and short pages on it's operation. perhaps the new owners will muster the manual's composition a bit better & extensive for all the stoves the company produces for all it's first time users.